Celebrating life in the Catholic Church

Yes, Virginia, there is a St Nicholas

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He is not just an idea. He was, and is, a saint. A saint who reminds us that we are loved without limits. A saint who challenges us to remove the limits on how we love others. A saint who calls us to holiness as we prepare to celebrate the greatest gift mankind has ever received. (Santa Claus is real. Catholic Online)

No, they’re not Judy. The fact that you’ve decided to give them the title ‘Saint’ is not evidence at all – it’s circular reasoning. They were good people (perhaps – I know not all saints were actually good people), but their ‘good’ lives are no more evidence for the existence of a god than any other good, non-theistic person’s life. And even if it were to be evidence of god, who’s to say that it’s evidence of your particular brand of god?

No, that’s not actually what I meant. I’m not suggesting their ‘good’ lives are evidence for God, any more than Alistair Crowley’s life is evidence for Satan.

What I’m suggesting is that if tens of thousands of people claim to have experienced the presence of God, if their lives are lived differently to those around them (and similarly to one another), and if they claim that difference is a result of their knowledge of God, then refusing to even consider whether they’re on to something smacks more of preconceived ideas than a search for evidence.

Goodness must ultimately come from somewhere. We hold that it comes from the supreme source of all goodness, God.

Atheism doesn’t a have a metaphysical explanation for the origins of goodness.

The existence of KA himself, a good person, is sufficient evidence for the existence of God.

Although, except for those of us who may have actually met him, most of us have more evidence for the existence of God than we have for the existence of some person behind the various monikers one encounters on the internet 🙂

The difference Chris, is that it is relatively easy to collect evidence to prove the real identity of the person behind an Internet pseudonym, but proving the existence of any of the myriad gods is impossible. All we have to go on is the evidence, and the paucity of any real evidence for the existence of any supernatural force can only lead one to conclude that belief in such a power is wholly within the mind of the individual

“The existence of KA himself, a good person, is sufficient evidence for the existence of God.”

It is no such thing. Any more than the existence of Saint Nicholas, Barbary Apes, Muppets, microwaves or the planet Venus are evidence for the existence of God.
Just saying these are evidence, does not make it so.
You are looking down the wrong end of the telescope, Chirs.

“An honest God is the noblest work of man,” is more like it..

“Goodness must ultimately come from somewhere. “ “Goodness” is not a substance, like Christmas Pudding. It is an idea. It comes from our perception of existence. That being so, it’s just as !”metaphysical” for an atheist as it is for a Catholic, a Muslim or a Quivering Brethren.

I’m happy to take Saint Nicholas, Barbary Apes, Muppets, microwaves or the planet Venus as evidence for the existence of God too.

The human person is evidence for God, because God dwells in the human person. Granted, not everyone is able to see that presence, not even all religious people, but nontheless I hold it because I constantly experience it.

Goodness is more than an idea, it’s a spiritual presence. When I experience goodness thru the kindness of someone, that’s something concrete and real. It has to come from somewhere.

Even if you say “It comes from our perception of existence” then that just moves the problem down to where does perception come from and where does existence come from.

If we keep asking where something comes from down the chain of its ancestors and causes then eventually we get back to a root cause, God.

One might as well say that the fact that there are over 300,000 different types of beetle is evidence for the fact that there is no God. Which it is not. All it could be construed as evidence for, is the fact that, if God does exist – He is partial to beetles. Nothing more.

No Mr T, but the absence of any concrete evidence for anything supernatural is more than sufficient for me to think that the only creatures particularly partial to beetles are entomologists and other beetles

KA, when you say ‘evidence,’ do you by any chance mean ‘proof’? It occurred to me in the night that we might be at cross-purposes in the way we are using the word.

‘Evidence’, as I understand the term, means grounds for belief, an indication or sign, data presented in support of the facts in issue. This is the sense in which I use the term, and your claim that there is no evidence for God is obviously nonsense if this is your sense. So I assume that you mean something different.

To expand these thoughts a bit more, evidence that suggests something is called circumstantial evidence; evidence that provides direct support for something is called direct evidence – I have direct evidence that you exist, because I’ve met you. Most of the other posters have only circumstantial evidence that you’re not a sock puppet I’ve invented to keep the discussion going.

‘Direct evidence’ and ‘proof’ are close in meaning, though I’d tend to use the term proof only for something that is substantial as well as supportive. Talking to you on the phone may qualify as direct evidence for your existence, but it is still not proof by itself. On the other hand, sufficient pieces of circumstantial evidence may – when combined – form a weight of evidence sufficient to constitute proof. Indeed, even before I met you, I felt reasonably sure that you did – in fact – exist.

Well, that’s certainly evidence, but even that isn’t really proof because KA’s existence is an inference our mind draws from what our senses tell us. But someone else might think reality is all an illusion, as in the Matrix movie.

Proof seems to depend, not only on evidence, but on an interpretive framework in which our mind makes sense of the evidence.

I think that Toad made a very valid point when he said that proof is extremely difficult to obtain, outside of certain quite restricted and very well defined problem spaces (like pure mathematics).

But at the end of the day we don’t need absolute proof to live our lives. We just need to be able to make enough sense of the world around us to get on with our lives and mission.

There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his teeth. (George Macdonald)